Publications & Discoveries
Areas of the brain that respond to the speech sounds are shown in pink, areas that respond to broader categories of sounds are in blue, and areas that respond to visual information are shown in green.
These results are from brain recordings while children, teens, and young adults listened to and watched movie trailers from Pixar, Disney, Dreamworks, and more. This is one of our most popular research tasks because it is easy and enjoyable to do for kids and families, and it still allows us to learn a lot about what the brain is doing when they're hearing language.
How can movies tell us about language and the brain?
Paper: Kurteff GL, Field AM, Asghar S, Tyler-Kabara EC, Clarke D, Weiner HL, Anderson AE, Watrous AJ, Buchanan RJ, Modur PN, Hamilton LS. Spatiotemporal mapping of auditory onsets during speech production. Journal of Neuroscience. 2024 Oct 22.​​​​
What's the idea?
In this paper, we show how the brain responds to sounds when we speak (production) and when we listen (perception). We found that brain responses in the auditory cortex were suppressed when participants were talking and hearing their own voice compared to when they heard their voice played back. This could be one way that the brain knows which sounds we generate ourselves, versus which sounds come from our external environment. On the other hand, a deep area called the insula responds both when we speak and when we listen, so we think it may be involved in helping us monitor what we are saying as we say it.
Paper: Omer Ashmaig, Liberty S. Hamilton, Pradeep Modur, Robert J. Buchanan, Alison R. Preston, Andrew J. Watrous (2021). A Platform for Cognitive Monitoring of Neurosurgical Patients During Hospitalization. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
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What's the idea?
In this paper, we show that we can use a Playstation 4 gaming system to understand brain functions in patients undergoing surgery for epilepsy. By measuring brain activity while people play a game or watch a movie, we can understand cognitive processes such as navigating through space, remembering something you have seen, or hearing different words. This type of monitoring might be used in addition to or instead of the more boring typical research tasks.
Paper: Maansi Desai, Jade Holder, Cassandra Villarreal, Nat Clark, Brittany Hoang and Liberty S. Hamilton (2021). Generalizable EEG Encoding Models with Naturalistic Audiovisual Stimuli. Journal of Neuroscience.
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What's the idea?
In this paper, we show that using children's movie trailers can be used to understand how the brain processes speech sounds in the same way that more controlled stimuli are used. This is important validation of our current work here and shows that we can make tasks that are fun for kids to do, but also still tell us about how the brain processes pitch, phonemes, and other aspects of speech.
Paper: Liberty S. Hamilton, Yulia Oganian, Jeffery Hall, Edward F Chang (2021). Parallel and distributed encoding of speech across the human auditory cortex. Cell.
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What's the idea?
In this paper, we show that the brain processes speech and other sounds in parallel, and that areas that we used to think were required for speech perception may not be. This work is important for understanding which different brain areas are responsible for speech processing versus other sounds, and we are now following up on this study in pediatric epilepsy through our current research study.
Paper: Maansi Desai, Rachel Sorrells, Matthew Leonard, Edward Chang, Liberty Hamilton (2020). Brain Stimulation Can Help Us Understand Music and Language. Frontiers for Young Minds.
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What's the idea?
In this paper, we show how electrical stimulation mapping, which is used to figure out which areas of the brain are required for speaking, listening, and moving, has also allowed us to understand how the brain processes music. This paper is a summary of a research article but was written for the journal Frontiers for Young Minds, which is a peer reviewed journal especially for kids (and kids at heart)!
Paper: M.R. Mercier, A.-S. Dubarry, F. Tadel, Liberty S. Hamilton, et al. (2022). Advances in human intracranial electroencephalography research, guidelines and good practices. Neuroimage.
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What's the idea?
Intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG), including stereo-electroencephalography (sEEG), describes the method by which electrodes are placed in your child's brain in order to measure brain activity. sEEG is what allows us to explore responses to speech and language in your child's brain. In this paper, we describe the best ways to conduct research in patients who are undergoing sEEG monitoring. We also describe the best ways to understand and analyze the data we collect from our participants!
The amplitude of an sEEG signal represented at corresponding anatomical location on a 3D brain representation